Published by Douglas Messerli, the World Cinema Review features full-length reviews on film from the beginning of the industry to the present day, but the primary focus is on films of intelligence and cinematic quality, with an eye to exposing its readers to the best works in international film history.

Sunday, May 4, 2014

Neil Jordan | Mona Lisa

George (Bob Hoskins), a small-time thug
who has just been released from prison, tries to make contact with his former
employer, Denny Mortwell (Michael Caine)—a man deeply involved in the porn
industry. Although he cannot locate Mortwell, an assistant assigns George a job
as a chauffeur for one of the prostitute clients, Simone (Cathy Tyson).

Ill-suited to the job, which also includes “playing” a partner to Simone
in order to get her past the stares of hotel managers, George begins his
position as a badly dressed, somewhat bigoted slob, but as he gradually forms a
relationship with what he first describes as a “thin black tart,” he is
changed. Buying new clothes for him, and demanding changes in his demeanor,
Simone gradually transforms the rough edges of his personality, while he,
describing her as a “lady,” gains her trust, revealing some of her past involving
a young girl, Cathy (Kate Hardie), with whom she once worked on the streets.

Much of Jordan’s noirish film is simply a beautifully cinematic
travelogue of the dark, underworld of London night life, as the locales
alternate between lavish hotels and the seedy street life and semen-covered carrels
of sex shops. Yet, at times, the plot goes out of its way to create a sense of
mystery when, in actuality, its story is quite simple—although, despite
watching this film now several times, I still do not quite comprehend the relationship
between Simone and Mortwell, since she presumably now works as an “independent”
prostitute. One also wonders why Mortwell is so determined that George get “dirty
information” on one of Simone’s clients; perhaps he simply wants something with
which to have control him for his other nefarious business transactions. George’s
friendship with an artist-writer, moreover, is so muddled that it is totally
unbelievable. It hardly matters, for the real center of this film, as George is
forced through his search for Cathy to reenter Mortwell’s dark world, is the
growing, non-sexual relationship between George and Simone.

Throughout, George seems almost sexless, rejecting the numerous pleas
for sex with the dozens of prostitutes he encounters through his job and search
for Simone’s friend. Clearly George, underneath a violent man who perceives male-female
relationships in terms of macho stereotypes, is simply fascinated by this woman
who, turning the tables on him, dominates and controls him while acting as a
submissive figure to her sexual clients. In this sense, Mona Lisa brings up several of the same issues of sexual identity
and gender as Jordan’s later film, The
Crying Game, particularly when he locates Simone’s friend only to discover
that Cathy, a drug addict, and Simone are lesbian lovers.

George finally perceives that he has been “used” by both Mortwell and
Simone, and when Mortwell and Simone’s former pimp both show up to punish the
liberating trio, Simone quite brutally shoots the attackers dead before turning
the gun on George as well. Finally,
realizing that she is now a truly “free” woman, she spares George’s life, just
as she has saved him through the murders. But unlike the more satisfying ending
of The Crying Game, where the
innocent Fergus “saves” Dil by himself claiming he is the killer, here we never
discover what happens to Simone and Cathy when the police show up. Might they
have to give up their freedom once more? So too does the work finally become a
kind of “cold work of art,” of which Nat King Cole sings in the title song.

Yet the film closes with George secretly meeting with his daughter,
whose mother refuses him contact, ending with a gentle kiss upon her forehead,
suggesting, perhaps, that Simone has succeeded in domesticating her “lover,” like
the painting of the Cole song, with only a smile.